My Letter to Pueblo City Council

To Pueblo City Council:

My company is That’s Natural! Marketing & Consulting and I have operated here in Pueblo since October 2005 – I do marketing, my main piece is a publication called That’s Natural!

1.) Pueblo Regional Building requires us to pull a permit for the event every week – $30.  They also require for us to pull a permit for each vendor who uses electricity every week ($15/vendor X 3-7 vendors).  They then require us to hire a certified electrical inspector for each market to walk with Pueblo Regional building to make sure that our vendors can plug in a cord to a City/County Building that is already inspected and approved by Pueblo Regional Building – this costs us $65/hour per week.  The grand total for an eight week market this year is $1,240 – last year $1,860. (I have asked the Midtown market if they have to pull any of these permits and have them (recorded) explaining that they just pull one permit for the event and the vendors have told me that they are not required to pull permits every week).

2.) The Pueblo City-County Health Department has done the following to scare away vendors from our market:
A. Not called or emailed them back.
B. Not called or emailed me back (as the Event Coordinator) when trying to answer questions that would allow them to come to the market.
C. Made them pay an additional $100 fee even if they were already certified and inspected by another County Health Department.
D. Be completely disorganized and unwilling to share information with either me or the vendors.
**Note, I have one vendor who was told by the HARP market that they did not need to do anything extra, whereas the Pueblo City-County health department (for MY market at the Arts Center) said they did.

3.) The Pueblo City Sales Tax now requires us to have a Temporary Use Sales Tax License for every 30 days that we are operating.  This was an additional $100 plus a background check (I have a real-estate license and a concealed carry permit – I think that should be sufficient?) and required us to get 3 different signatures throughout the City.  This department has also been difficult in getting to answer questions, although they have gotten better in the past week or so.

I understand that the City of Pueblo just wants things to be safe and to make your money off of the sales.  I get it.  What I do not understand is how you can suck the life-blood out of the small businesses who make that money for you.  SEVEN VENDORS – if not more – coming from all over the state have been halted in the past two years because of the asinine behavior of the Health Department.  ALL of the time that I could be rounding up more vendors and getting people to spend more money (e.g. MORE SALES TAX REVENUES FOR THE CITY).  That is the whole point – why can’t the City let me do what I am good at?  Instead, I have to fight to stay operating.

Beyond stagnating the growth for the City of Pueblo – the behavior and treatment towards me compared to the other two markets is unfair and discriminatory.

Tisha Casida

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